I was leaving the office Wednesday afternoon about 2:55 to go to the Downtown Business Association meeting.

As a former reporter, I've still got pretty sharp news instincts. And when I was walking to my car to get my camera and saw about half-a-dozen guys dressed in fatigues taking a battering ram to the door of a house a couple hundred yards up Saratoga Street and another half-a-dozen standing in the street with automatic weapons drawn, I thought, "Hey, what's going on?"

My heart pounding, I raced back into the office to grab my camera screaming something about terrorists, I think, — for all I knew, Osama bin Laden was holed up in the house — when managing editor Luefras Robinson told me not to worry about it, that reporter Allison Williams was already up there.

I didn't find out until later that it was the Suffolk Police Department's Critical Incident Response Team practicing maneuvers.

A Critical Incident Response Team? Geez. I had no idea we had anything like that here in Suffolk. That's an awful lot of firepower.

They're liable to need it, too. That house is located in the historic district and unless they had permission from the Historic Landmarks Commission to beat up on it like that, they could be in for it.

The HLC is fanatical about stuff like that n Heck, I believe they have their own armed Critical Incident Response Team that's called out when someone tries to put vinyl siding or something on a historic district house. It would be a blood bath.